Status as of Wednesday, October 15

[Steve Sokolowski]

Here's the status as of today:

• Something happened for about an hour overnight, causing the mining server to shut down. The server has never crashed in the 3 months we have had the site running. It turns out that the system ran out of memory. To prevent this from happening again, I'm going to ask Chris to write a script to restart the server if the script detects that the server shut down. While not an optimal solution, it will prevent against the system going offline between when we check on it. I apologize for the inconvenience with this issue and we'll do our best to make sure it doesn't happen again. On Saturday, we will increase the amount of memory available to this server.
• Generally, the only time we lack coverage is between 5:30am and 7:30am Eastern, because Chris is a night owl. I'm wondering if it might be a good idea to hire one of the pool's miners to monitor the pool during that time and be given the power to enable and disable coins if profitability is wrong and to restart if the server crashes.
• The release has now had a code freeze, so at this point we will only be fixing issues. Merge mining is not likely to make it into this release, but the previous enhancements, like the ability to ignore the payout threshold, will. Dogecoin prices are falling, so there may be a point where merge mining's effect is negligible.
• Every time we beat down the Elacoin market, buy orders keep flooding in. It's amazing. If anyone can explain to me why Elacoins are so wanted all of a sudden, I would be glad to hear why.
• We also decided to upgrade to postgres 9.3 in this update, because postgres 9.3 allows for "index scans" when counting the number of rows in a table. For queries like "select count(1) from shares," where shares has 10m rows, postgres 9.1 actually performs a full table scan. In version 9.3, an index scan takes place, which can reduce the number of rows scanned from 10m to 10.

I also thought it would be worth explaining some of the costs we incur, which many other pools take out before paying customers. Out of the 4.99% fee, we have to pay the following:

• Bandwidth costs of $7/day
• Debt service on the $7000 in equipment, including UPSs, generators, routers, and so on purchased to host the site
• 0.25% in selling fees to exchanges, and an additional 0.25% in buying fees for people who want to be paid out in other coins besides bitcoins
• Slippage that occurs during the delay between when we mine blocks and when they mature
• The risk of unforeseen bugs that could cause losses of funds, since miners are paid a set rate
• The risk of not finding blocks on coins like litecoins
• Withdrawal fees from Cryptsy, because Cryptsy overcharges on withdrawals relative to what the network charges
• Transaction fees to send blocks to exchanges, and to send payouts to miners

While not all of them practice this, some other pools deduct fees like exchange fees before paying out, so their "3% fee" actually is taken after the other fees are deducted and they account for slippage. The numbers reported at the top of the page and which are reported to PoolPicker are the numbers we pay out after our pool's fee is taken.